Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/311

 Sheffield; Lord Stanley was thenceforth known as Lord Sheffield.

 HOLYOAKE, GEORGE JACOB (1817–1906), co-operator and secularist, born at 1 Inge Street, Birmingham, on 13 April 1817, was eldest son and second of thirteen children of George Holyoake, engineer, by his wife Catherine Groves. His mother carried on independently a business for making horn buttons, and George practised when still a child some of the processes of the manufacture. He was apprenticed to a tinsmith, and afterwards worked with his father at the Eagle Foundry as a whitesmith. Later, the father bought some machinery then newly invented for making bone buttons and placed his son in charge of it.

The boy's inclinations lay, however, towards intellectual pursuits, and at the age of seventeen he became a student at the Old Mechanics' Institute, where he showed aptitude for mathematics and the making of mechanical instruments. He began to teach mathematics in Sunday schools when he was twenty, and about the same time to assist with classes at the Mechanics' Institute. In 1839, on the occasion of a machinery and art exhibition at Birmingham, he was selected to explain to the public the working of some of the machines.

Deeply moved in youth by the aspirations which produced the Owenite and Chartist movements, Holyoake joined the Birmingham reform league at the age of fourteen (1831), and became a Chartist a year later. In 1837 he attended meetings addressed by [q. v.]. In 1838 he delivered his first lecture on socialism and co-operation and enrolled himself a member of the Owenite 'Association of all Classes of all Nations.' He was present at the great Chartist riots, known as the Bull Ring riots, at Birmingham on 15 July 1839.

Holyoake had been brought up in the strictest evangelical tenets, which his mother firmly held, but his association with liberal movements broadened his beliefs. Abandoning the life of a workman, he accepted in 1840 an invitation from the Owenites of Worcester to minister for them at their hall of science. These halls, which were springing up in many towns, were centres of educational and propagandist work. Under such influences Holyoake's beliefs rapidly grew rationalistic. Next year, on the invitation of the congress of the Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists, he went to Sheffield to lecture and conduct a school. In 1841 he was one of the editors of 'The Oracle of Reason' (published at Bristol), and when a colleague, Charles Southwell, was imprisoned next year for blasphemy, Holyoake continued the paper, and, being compelled to examine the evidences of Christianity with some thoroughness, finally rejected them altogether. On 24 May 1842, in the course of a walk from Birmingham to Bristol, where Southwell was in prison, he lectured at the Mechanics' Institution; Cheltenham, and in reply to a question by an auditor made flippant reference to the deity. Arrested on a charge of blasphemy on 1 June, he was committed by the magistrates for trial at the Gloucester Assizes, and on declining to swear to his own recognisances, was refused bail. He was tried at the Gloucester Assizes on 15 Aug. 1842, before Justice [q. v.], on a charge of blasphemy at common law, and after defending himself in a nine hours' speech, was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. A report of the trial was published in the same year, and in 1851 Holyoake, in 'The History of the Last Trial by Jury for Atheism in England,' appealed to the attorney-general and the clergy for some change in the law. But no alteration was made, and several trials on the like charge have taken place since (cf., Hist. of Criminal Law, ii. 473-6).

On his release from prison Holyoake came to London, and, opening a shop for the sale of advanced literature, continued his varied propaganda. He was secretary of the anti-persecution union, which demanded freedom of theological thought and speech. He was editor of 'The Movement' (1843), a republican and radical journal. But practical social reform also occupied his mind. Supporting the principle of co-operative production and distribution, he presided at the opening of the Toad Lane store at Rochdale in 1845. To his enthusiasm the spread of the co-operative idea owed much. During 1845 he was in Glasgow as lecturer again to a body of Owenites. But he soon returned to London, and started the 'Reasoner' on 3 June 1846. This was the most sustained of the many journals which he conducted. It was followed in 1850 by the 'Leader.'

Drifting away both from Owenism and